This article studies the pricing problem of a seller given an initial inventory of products with heterogeneous quality, facing uncertain customer arrivals over a finite selling season. We consider various regimes depending on whether the seller inspects the inventory to assess the quality levels of the products, and whether customers examine the inventory themselves and pick their specific item of choice among the available products. We formulate the problem under each regime as a stochastic optimization model which maximizes the seller's expected profits, capturing the salient problem features such as stochastic customer arrivals, customers' choice behavior, and uncertain product qualities. As obtaining closed-form solutions or structural properties for the optimal prices is quite difficult, we explore the full information solution to the problem as an upper bound, as well as solution approaches that approximate some key problem characteristics. Finally, we substantiate our results through an extensive numerical study, focusing on the performance of the proposed pricing policies and approximations.

中文翻译：

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客户最清楚：异质产品的定价政策

本文研究了卖家的定价问题，给定初始库存的产品质量各不相同，在有限的销售季节面临不确定的客户到达。我们考虑各种制度，这取决于卖方是否检查库存以评估产品的质量水平，以及客户是否自行检查库存并从可用产品中选择他们的特定项目。我们将每个制度下的问题制定为一个随机优化模型，该模型最大化卖方的预期利润，捕捉随机客户到达、客户选择行为和不确定产品质量等突出问题特征。由于以最优价格获得封闭形式的解决方案或结构特性非常困难，我们探索作为上限的问题的完整信息解决方案，以及近似某些关键问题特征的解决方案。最后，我们通过广泛的数值研究证实了我们的结果，重点关注所提出的定价政策和近似值的性能。